596 Irving, John
“more lust,” he presents only the most straightfor-
ward of Irving’s male complexities and inversions.
At first, Roberta Muldoon seems the iconic
type of Irving’s subversive gender politics, with his
asexualizing of the feminist and his hypersexual-
izing of Garp; Roberta Muldoon used to be Robert
Muldoon, quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles
and now a transsexual. “He” has become a “she”
through the miracles of modern surgery. A six-and-
a-half-foot, broad shouldered woman who knows
who she is, she is both the theoretical feminist ideal
and the ultimate sexual suspect. She also transcends
any identifiable—and thus limiting—category. It
would not be too grand a pronouncement to say that
Roberta Muldoon is the most sympathetic character
in The World According to Garp. He is the one unfail-
ing, loyal, engaging, protective, giving, generous, and
honest person in the novel. Ultimately, being able to
dispense with strictures of gender and discovering
a self-defined sexual identity is the most successful
way to become a good—which is to say, self-aware
and fully realized—person, at least according to
Garp.
Aaron Drucker
Guilt in The World According to Garp
In The World According to Bensenhaver, the novel
character T. S. Garp is working on in John Irving’s
The World According to Garp, guilt abounds. “In
Garp’s work, guilt always abounds,” as it does in
Garp’s world. This world is shaped and defined by
guilt. Characters act to avoid it, to relieve it, and to
heal from it. Reeling from Helen’s critical reaction
to a short story he wrote, Garp’s anger and frustra-
tion and desire for approval force him to sleep. The
narrator explains, “But, actually, he’d had so much
on his mind, he’d been confused; he had fallen
asleep because he was bewildered. If he’d been able
to focus his feelings on any one thing, he’d still have
been awake when she came upstairs. They might
have saved a lot of things, then.” Helen wakes him
gently, but in his dreams, he is thinking of Mrs.
Ralph, his son’s friend’s mother. He feels the guilt
of his virtual infidelity only as a reflection on how
it would affect his wife to know that while she was
engaging him, he was thinking of another woman.
It is impossible to consider guilt sufficiently in Garp
without first acknowledging the novel’s distinctly
adult subject matter. Sex and adultery permeate the
matter of the novel, and each major conflict circles
around some aspect of sexual transgression. Guilt
is a pervasive sensibility in Irving’s novel, from the
haunting of each character by his or her personal
indiscretions or violations to the radical group-guilt
of the Ellen Jamesians. There is no one untouched
by the undertow of sex and guilt. Surviving the
“undertoad” of life’s errants and errors, learning to
cope, to resolve, and to grow, that is what presses
the novel forward. Guilt gives purpose to The World
According to Garp.
T. S. Garp carries on several extramarital affairs
throughout the novel, and Helen engages in only
one. She commits to stray with Michael Milton,
one of her graduate students, and when they are
exposed, she tells Garp that she can break it off
cleanly and decently. She explains that, “She felt
she had never lost sight of Garp and the children
during this indulgence; she felt justified in handling
it her way, now.” Garp takes the kids out to a movie
in order to allow Helen the space to handle it her
way. But circumstances conspire in the tragic iro-
nies of the characters’ lives. Michael Milton insists
upon seeing her one last time, and he drives to the
Garps’ home. She meets him in the front seat of
his 1951 Buick Dynaflow, where they engage in a
last sexual act—the last gasp of a foolish recreation.
Garp calls home, and Helen does not answer. Furi-
ous and impulsive, Garp gathers Duncan and Walt
and drives them home early. To entertain the kids,
Garp is in the habit of shutting off the motor and
the lights of his car, coasting into the driveway in
the black and the silence, a suburban roller-coaster
thrill. In the darkness, he never sees the massive,
parked station wagon in the driveway, and his
children—thrilling to the rush, unbuckled in the
back seat of the family car—are caught completely
unaware by the collision.
There is a clear moral for the cuckolding lover,
Michael Milton, as the clench of Helen’s jaw during
the accident proceeds to limit all future indiscretions.
In Garp’s words, “Three quarters is not enough.”
One would think Milton would disagree. And yet
such a literal emblem for the loss of masculinity that
cuckolding represents is typical of Irving’s novel.